Painting US Empire is a book of considerable ambition, as the title implies. It aspires to rebuild “the architecture of the field [of art history] with a new set of terms oriented to the politics of empire” (13), and to shift the terms of analysis “from one of geographic exploration to conquest and of cultural exchange to exploitation” (16; emphasis added). Along with raw materials, artists circulate as well; their representational strategies in Cao’s analysis mirror the processes of imperial extraction, colonization, and control, which provide the context for the larger argument.
Painting US Empire is organized around five case studies spanning the second half of the nineteenth century, from landscape painters Frederic Church and William Bradford in two chapters; to trompe l’oeil painter De Scott Evans; painter and stained-glass innovator John La Farge; and painter in oil and watercolor Winslow Homer. Medium and genre matter here. Cao—a Harvard-trained scholar who identifies as a person of color—is a methodologically astute mid-career art historian who skillfully weaves together the thematics of U.S. imperial aspirations in American art—expanded through historical research that nuances earlier socially oriented histories—and readings focused mostly around one or two key works by each artist. Building on advanced scholarship in the field of U.S. arts, she makes the argument that the material, compositional, and narrative elements of her key works offer constitutive firsthand evidence of a range of artistic engagements with the nation’s imperial histories, from “uncertainty … [to] opportunism … critique … and complicity” (4).
Cao approaches her five case studies through what she calls “colonizing infrastructures” that enabled the nation’s quest for raw materials (she cites the stunningly named “Guano Islands Act of 1856” as an example) and for labor and new markets during this phase of imperialism (9). These imperial drives co-existed with settler colonial expansion into the transcontinental West, by now a well-trodden feature of U.S. art histories that were broadly launched with the 1992 West as America exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution. Cao acknowledges these overlapping phases of empire, but as a key tool of her analysis, colonizing infrastructures engage very different, embedded forms of visual evidence to support her claims.
These infrastructures—traceable within the works Cao discusses—turn on the circulatory movement of plants, ice, exotic goods, artist-travelers, and tourists. Driving these movements is a globalizing U.S. marketplace existing in tandem with an expansive new consumerist middle-class that fueled commercial expansion. Water—in both fluid and solid states, as ice, blocking access to open seas—is a primary element in what Cao calls the “navigational” imperative of imperial maps of circulation. But here also is where empire’s dreams collide with natural facts—that water freezes and organic processes obstruct—in ways that resist imperial motives.
The capitalist regulation of time forms another epistemological infrastructure driving empire in these decades. Chronophotography emerged in the late nineteenth century; Cao finds an echo of its condensed and elided stop-action images in La Farge’s watercolors of Samoan dance. A final infrastructure of empire is the burgeoning tourism of white European-Americans who invade ecologically and culturally sensitive environments, themselves already marked by centuries of enslavement and colonization.
Cao’s study stops at the very point when most historians date the origins of U.S. imperialism: its actual military and territorial conquests, beginning in the 1890s with the War of 1898 and the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaiʽi, and Guam, and continuing throughout the twentieth century. Cao connects these two phases of empire by the deep cultural ligatures of race and white supremacy, which undergird the long history of U.S. imperial claims: the assumed superiority, cultural condescension, and othering that shape the very representational language of much U.S. arts in these decades, steeped as artists were in a hegemonic culture of empire.
Cao’s revised timescale of U.S. empire thus brings with it the challenge of interpreting representational languages that have an indirect relationship to the historical processes they ostensibly reference. Painting US Empire moves beyond iconographic readings of the kind that characterized earlier studies of continental expansion that built on recognized cultural scripts. Instead, Cao excavates artistic ties to imperial processes through layered contextual mediations; at times, this involves slipping from visual metaphor to historical frame with suspicious agility. (See, for instance, Cao’s claim that “to see ice as sculpted stone rather than frozen water entangled the arctic in marble’s racial ideologies” [84].) Turning in some instances to evidence that is not there—finding traces of race in “cultural products without obvious racial imagery”—she draws attention to a work’s unconscious embeddedness in acts of empire building (87)
To expose the implicit racism in many of the works she discusses, along with charges of artistic complicity with the nation’s imperial mission, Cao skillfully deploys five “interventions” that carry the reader forward to contemporary installation, environmental, performance, and video work by a compelling range of artists. These works recover the submerged, forgotten, or erased imperial histories of Western nation-states. Coming at the conclusion of each of her five case studies, they confront the amnesia of the nation’s seemingly official story—the erasure of the racism that drove assumptions about the nation’s exceptionalism in assuming free access to non-Western raw materials and cultures. This dialectic of exposure reveals the arrogance that haunts the imperial imagination of the nineteenth century.
Cao does her best to tease out examples of work that rise above their own historical horizon to question the assumptions of cultural superiority and epistemological arrogance that mostly characterize the artists in her study. But Painting US Empire stands or falters on the leap of faith required by the reader to engage with the nineteenth-century works of art that are called upon to support the layers of historical mediation Cao offers, shouldering much of the weight of her visual arguments about race and imperial assumptions. Painting US Empire does aim to restore some degree of critical artistic agency over the hegemonic power of imperial assumptions. But her often fascinating histories of empire also generate a very different thesis. Alongside the historical evidence of the nation’s dreams of imperial mastery—of nature, of climate, of oceans, and of non-western societies—are repeating stories of failure: of ice blocking access to the fabled Northwest passage opening trade with the riches of Asia; of the sheer power of organic life to overtake and erase the frail footprint of European colonizing efforts; of non-western strategies of resistance, from mimicry to the ways in which western cultural documents are commandeered to serve as tools of indigenous ancestry and knowledge. Cao’s title implies imperial triumph; her book documents instead the histories of its defeat, a story whose contemporary realities are playing out in the present.
